Who rocked best? Q is the answer
Quatro gets paid just a little of the respect she is due in the film Suzi Q.
With all due respect to my estimable and journalistically formidable colleague Kylie Klein Nixon, I reckon she made a mistake the other week, in her otherwise unimpeachable and scientifically rigorous column on the most roof-raising of bangers you need to regale the workmates and wha¯ nau with at your next karaoke party.
In that column, Klein Nixon wrote that Joan Jett – who I once saw in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles and practically swooned – is the coolest woman on the planet.
I’m sorry mate, Joan is a pioneer, a trailblazer, an icon, an all-time contender for the podium and someone whose music I still thrash on an occasional Drive show on Wellington’s Radio Active FM.
But even Joan admits that she owes it all – or at least, a big chunk of it – to the incredible Susie Quatro, who came thundering out of Detroit in 1971, moved to London and released a debut album in 1973 that included 48 Crash and Can the Can.
Quatro – so cool she didn’t even need to invent a stage name – toured with Slade and Alice Cooper, scored hit singles across Europe, while always being far too edgy and unmarketable for the anodyne United States radio market.
And it was Quatro who made the lowslung guitar and androgynous leather catsuit her very own, years before a later generation of woman rockers would appropriate it.
Quatro gets paid just a little of the respect she is due in the film Suzi Q, available now on the DocPlay platform.
Suzi Q charts Quatro’s journey from singing with her sisters in Detroit, to success in the United Kingdom and Europe, battles against the notoriously sexist and smarmy music industry and press, and her eventual return to the US.
Interviewees include everyone from Jett – of course – to Chrissie Hynde, Lita Ford, Deborah Harry and, er, Henry Winkler, who Quatro worked with on Happy Days.
Suzi Q is a film about a woman who is still living her life on her own damn terms, with all the frustration, conflict, triumph and resolution that implies. You’ll love it.
Then again, if the Wanda Jackson documentary The Sweet Lady With the
Nasty Voice ever turns up on a legal stream, I’ll have to write this column all over again.
And maybe, they all pale next to the incomparable Betty Davis, who did it all in the world of funk and soul, while battling and besting everything the world could throw at her and – somehow – surviving being married to Miles Davis.
The 2017 documentary Betty: They Say I’m Different is available to watch via nastygirlmovie.com.
It’ll change your life.